busloads of fun!

Public transport in Lesotho sucks. I'm no literary genius, but there's really no better word for it than that. It's uncomfortably crowded, slow and extremely unreliable. People on taxis are transporting small farm animals, haven't bathed in an offensively long time, or are three sheets to the wind. Someone's child may very well end up on your lap (or their chicken conveniently at your ankles) and, inevitably, harassment of some form (often mild) occurs. Music is both painfully bad and painfully loud and everyone is fascinated by a while person on board - they never take public! All the expats have cars! ... except PCV's, we don't miss out on any part of the experience.

I'm very lucky when it comes to transport. There are 5 or 6 kombis (passenger vans with seats for 15) daily running between Ramabanta and Maseru. People in the mountains can spend ten hours on a bus getting to Maseru and some really remote PCV's have to spend two days getting to the capitol - impressive in a country the size of Maryland - or face river crossings or two hour hikes to the main road. I live 30 seconds from the road. It's not bad.

That road runs from Maseru to Semongkong, where it ends abruptly. Along the way you pass Roma, where the National University of Lesotho is located, and then Motsupeli, where the tar road turns to dirt just 15 km (but 30-40 min driving) from Ramabanta. No kombis make the drive to Semongkong because the road is so shoddy and the grade too steep - to get there you have to A) take the bus (4 hours from Maseru to Semong) or B) hitch. I choose plan B when I make the trip up there... except the last time. I was with two other people, cars were few and far between, and it's only two hours on the dreaded bus from Rama to Semong... how bad can it be?

We made it 15 minutes into the journey.

Buses break down all the time. The roads are terrible, they're consistently overloaded with passengers and cargo, and going up into the mountains is no easy trip. Our bus was fine, as it turned out, but ahead of us on a very steep slope the first bus of the day had died - in the dead center of the road. It's one of three "paved" sections up to Semong due to the grade of the hill, so it's narrow and heavily eroded and potholed by age, weather and rainfall. There's room for two vehicles if they're both inches from each side (one side being a worrisome steep drop into a valley). There was no way for our bus - the red one - to pass the broken blue one.

So people simply started building the road. The three of us were significantly surprised because other solutions seemed more realistic and safe - not to mention easier. Putting the blue bus in neutral and rolling it backwards (it was facing uphill) and steering it off to the side was one, but this was "too dangerous" as the brakes could have failed. Fine, the second idea is even better! Turns out there's a third bus coming from Semong to Maseru waiting to pass the blue bus at the top of this monster hill. So just transfer the passengers! The 'ole switcheroo! We get on that bus, they hop on the red bus and everyone (minus the broken bus) is on their merry way!

Nope. Why? I still ask that question... but why dwell on what we cannot understand? So anyway, fine.... we'll help build a road, too. The blue bus is centered very accurately on the tar portion of the road. For a visual, if you're standing in front of the bus at the grill, you're looking downhill and into the Ramabanta river valley. There's just enough room on the right for a car to pass - with mirrors folded in - to inch by without falling in the the 3 foot ravine between the road and cliff wall. On the left is the dirt shoulder which sits 2 feet below the level of the tar road, and farther left is the steep fall into a valley. This is the side we build the road on because it's closer to the level of the pavement (and more dangerous = more exciting). Most of the passengers pitch in so that a bus can get past the blue piece of junk in our way. On the cliff side, where failure means certain death for the driver of the bus.

But. But before we finish our effort, the bus driver on his way from Semong gets impatient. He unloads passengers and cargo and comes flying down the hill and slowly edges off the pavement onto our unfinished rocky road (mmmmnnnn....). I was sure I was about to see a man die. For the next hour, everyone watched as he inched over and forward, sometimes slipping, while men rushed around to reposition large boulders. Just when i think there's no way it'll work, Lesotho surprises me. He made it past.

Our red bus was never going to make it, not going uphill. We'd left Rama at 2pm and it was now 530. Personally, I was hungry and a bit cranky (*gasp!) when a group of friends who'd rented a special hire kombi to take them to Semong (smart) eeked past the blue bus and took us into their already crowded vehicle. We heard the red bus only left after a dump truck came down from Semong and towed the blue bus out of the way sometime around 7pm.

But I checked on the way back two days later (in a hitch, not on the friggin' bus) and our "road" is still there.

On a lighter note, a few of us participated in the first annual donkey bar crawl in Semongkong (post bus adventures). I'll spare my parents the horrors of posting most of the pictures, but it was a great time and a wonderful end to the crazy afternoon of trying to reach Semongkong.





A local homebrew stand; imagine sour porridge that tastes like stale beer and wood smoke. That's sort of what joala (local brew) is like.









Only one Rand for a chicken foot to satisfy drunken munchies (or breakfast - it was still early).




Happy Trails